Professional cruncher of 'impossible' problems. Philosopher. Scientist. Adventurer.
Programming Working Simulator Programs on Mainframe Computers at 9 yrs old | First tech start-up at 16 yrs old | Wrote first OS at 17 yrs old | Grad school at 20 yrs old | Still learning more accelerating rapidly!

Thursday, 18 December 2014

Mark Baker: What happens to organizations like yours if they don't do this transformation?David Cook: Embracing digital means that we can take Time Out further and faster than ever before. It’s an incredibly exciting period for us. We’re building from a very strong base; we have a great brand and some very loyal fans. We consider ourselves very much a multi-media publisher, so print remains an important part of the mix. However, digital platforms mean that we can offer a service wherever and whenever our readers are looking for our advice.
So, for us, it’s not a question of whether to transform or not, we’re already well on the way.Mark Baker: If there were 3 things that you think that a prospective CDO needs to know? what would be the key things to know or do?

David Cook: Yeah, I think they would be: Be be Respectful, Collaborate collaborate and Innovate

I've seen people come in to an organization who are very disrespectful to what’s happened before; they can be quick to blame others and belittle previous decisions. I don’t think that’s a great way to build relations, so I’d always recommend being respectful of the past.

Collaboration is also key. The best way to get things done is to work with others and deliver something that the whole company is proud of. There’s no benefit to either isolating yourself or your immediate team.

Finally, I think that it is important to establish a framework for innovation and experimentation. It is too easy to get left behind and you need to make time for thinking the unthinkable . . .

Read more of this interview and others like it from digital thought leader look out for the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Mark Baker: So as a Chief Digital Officer, what barriers have you had to overcome in creating this digital transformation?

David Cook: I think everybody has had to adjust to the changes in consumer behaviour; that’s a big shift for any organization. You have to assume that everything we produce is now read on mobile first; that’s very different to a traditional print mindset.
It’s important to challenge the status quo; you have to devise new ways to expand and new ways to make money if you’re going to remain a leader in the digital age.

Mark Baker: Did you find that the goals of the key stakeholders were aligned? Have they had the same vision or have the key stakeholders have different perceptions about what should and shouldn't be done, and about who should be making the decisions as well?

David Cook: Yeah, that's a good question. Once the new CEO started, it probably took us a few months to agree what the grand vision was. We wanted to challenge every preconception about the sort of growth that was achievable and set ourselves some big, hairy audacious goals. Rather than talking about expanding into 80 cities, we started talking about 800.

Mark Baker: How did you sell that idea internally?

David Cook: We devised a new operating model, something we call ‘Time Out in a Box’, which described in practical terms how we could expand efficiently and keep costs low; the good news is that we’re already seeing it come to fruition. Having a plan is one thing, but seeing it work really gets everybody aligned and behind the vision.

Mark Baker: Can you give us any actual case studies of the transformations? Maybe roll-outs of ‘Time Out in a Box’?

David Cook: One example that comes to mind, is our franchise partner in Spain. In January 2014, they came to the UK to discuss expansion and were assuming it was an 18 month project requiring significant investment. We walked them through the new operating model and, to their delight, Madrid was live within 4 months at a relatively small cost. It was a major achievement and it gives everybody confidence.

Mark Baker: And are there different boxes lined up for other Spanish cities?

David Cook: Yes, it wouldn't surprise me that next year we add three more cities in Spain; there are plenty of great cities to choose from. We've also been using the model internally across the UK and US. We’re big in London, New York, Chicago, and LA, but that was really the extent of our footprint in those markets. This year alone, we've added Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, Glasgow, Washington DC, Miami, Las Vegas, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Seattle and Philadelphia. That represents a massive change in our time to market for new cities when compared to the past.

Mark Baker: And in each case you just have one or two people on the ground?

David Cook: Initially it’s a small local team supported by freelance journalists. They’re then supported by centralized national and global teams. As the audience in each city grows, so we increase the size of the local team. Some content, such as film reviews or interviews, can be produced centrally and distributed locally; that benefits everybody.

Mark Baker: And how do the local teams interact with the national center or even with main headquarters, if they are in for example LA or San Francisco? What’s life like for them?

David Cook: Typically the local teams comprise Editorial and Sales staff. They have a direct link with the national team and there are regular meetings that keep everybody on the same page. Ideas flow in both directions and we frequently see local initiatives being picked up and rolled out globally.
It’s tough for any remote team, but we do our best to keep everybody engaged.

Time Out was founded in 1968 in London by Tony Elliott, Time Out has since grown into a global media group that, as of November 2014, spans 68 cities across 37 countries with a monthly combined audience of over 33 million. The business is well positioned to provide the platform and marketplace for inspiring people to make the most of their city through a distribution network, which incorporates a growing online presence, mobile applications, magazines, events and partnerships.

Mark Baker: So tell me about your organization, David, about yourself and how you got to where you are.

David Cook: Okay, well, I'll start with the organization. Time Out has been around since 1968, being the original listings magazine for London in terms of what's going on in the city around you. It's gradually grown over the years to become a global success. We now have presence in 68 cities and 37 countries around the world. It is a business with a strong print heritage, so digital really only became a priority after we received investment from Oakley Capital a few years ago now .

In terms of my background, I'm a software engineer by profession. At university I studied astrophysics, but I also did a lot of programming, having got a taste for it back in the early 80's. It was as a result of those two disciplines that I ended up working for a company called Logica in the space and defence sector. Gradually I moved from software engineering into project and change management. After that I got into more senior leadership roles, firstly at the NHS, then Marshall Wace, Auto Trader and now Time Out. It was at Auto Trader where I got firsthand experience of digital transformation; so, when we the company had finished that particular journey, it was a good time to leave and leverage that experience elsewhere. Time Out ended up being the right fit at the right time. After 4 years of distance learning, I completed my MBA at the end of 2013.

Mark Baker: That's great. Can you tell me about the development of the Time Out digital road map? How you've gone about that?

David Cook: I initially joined as CTO, in June 2013. However, when Tim Arthur became CEO, we decided to create the Chief Digital Officer role, which covers Research, Innovation, User Experience, Design, Product Development, Technology, and Analytics. It's quite a broad remit, but brings together the core digital teams under one umbrella. When compared to our peers, we had some catching up to do – as an example, our mobile web experience was not up to scratch. We were able to set a road map pretty quickly just by looking at what others were doing around us, but we are now coming out of that phase. We have a very clear vision and direction, so we can finally move forward with some new and exciting initiatives.

Mark Baker: So, how far forward does your road map take you?

David Cook: We look at the road map across 3 distinct horizons: Horizon One covers what we’re doing now and for the next 6 months; Horizon Two covers what we plan to do next, roughly up to 12 months out; and then we have Horizon Three, which is obviously 12 months plus.

At the moment, we are focused on 3 main initiatives: firstly, a new product that we recently launched into the market called Premium Profiles; secondly, the roll out of our new responsive website, which has been designed mobile-first; and thirdly, the development of a new blogging platform that we’ll be opening up to the Time Out community. Looking further forward, we’re planning to update our ecommerce platform; release a new suite of apps; and revamp Time Out Dating.

When it comes to Horizon Three, we’re looking at the connected TV, connected car and wearables. So for example, we’re considering how we might expand the user journey from the desktop, tablet and phone onto these new devices whilst still providing a coherent and useful end-to-end experience.

. . more tomorrow . . .

Read more of this interview and others like it from digital thought leader look out for the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook

Thursday, 11 December 2014

This is an excerpt from my interview with Jora Gill from the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer's Handbook. Jora is the new Chief Digital Officer of the Economist. The interview will appear in full with other digital though leaders in the forthcoming handbook.

Mark
Baker: That leads us into the next question
about whether you've had a situation with key stakeholders having different
perceptions of what should and shouldn't be done digitally and where
ultimately, these decisions lie?

Jora
Gill: I think each stakeholder, be it technology
marketing, sales, advertising, finance, have their own KPIs within,an
organisation and they are measured by these KPIs. So along comes digital disruption
that requires collaborations across departments. However the KPIs have not been
set across organisations but within each department so do not allow the
organization to collaborate and miss KPIs in one department for the sake of
another succeeding.

CIOs and CTOs are trapped in KPIs for example
other departments demand that they be more successful with projects not
experiment and fail and be rewarded for early failure, they must cut costs but
are not rewarded for new innovative products that increase profits as profits
do not sit within their departments, their departments are brought into
projects when the project has been decided and now costs are required rather
than a lean philosophy of building incrementally to customer needs. CIOs are in
that unenviable position of knowing what’s wrong and often what to do about it
but are often not empowered to make radical decisions across the
organization…did I mention Kodak and Blockbuster?

So the question should be "How can we
collaborate throughout an organisation where we deliver to customer value ?”

Mark
Baker: Can you give details of case studies from
your past experience.

Jora
Gill: Yes
we at The Economist have collaborated across departments and looked at the
customer journey when purchasing new subscriptions or one offs through our
eCommerce systems. However we took the journey from start to end with lots of
‘what ifs’ built in. We therefore looked at our marketing systems, our sales
systems, our customer care systems, our billing systems. We took the journey of
a straightforward transaction, a complex transactions, a transactions where a
decision was taken not to proceed half way etc. etc.

We took all of these journeys as if we were
the customer and then we mapped all the systems against these journeys. What we
found was that the experience was great when straightforward but difficult when
complicated. We then looked at the best of breed systems across the above areas
and mapped them, once integrated, across these journeys and found a much better and lower touch point
experience. We are now implementing a new solution that will provide our
customers with a greater experience when interacting with us.

Mark
Baker: So you have a process to get the answer.

Jora
Gill: It's a process of starting with an
assumptions then experiment with it and then based on those experiments and the
data (feedback loop), going back to our assumption board and ask "Was our
assumption and experiment correct, if yes great carry on?" or "If no
it wasn't. Do we throw the whole thing away or modify slightly?" If we
decide to do something slightly or radically different, we then experiment
again and then go back again to the data. "Were we correct this time?"

Look at firms, where did Twitter start?
They didn't come up with the idea of Twitter on day one and built the company.
They pivoted a number of times before landing on an assumption that was correct
and the rest is history.. What about Facebook, Groupon, Link-In…? All the same
they experimented and experimented until they had the right formulae. Their
strategies evolved over a number of years

Mark
Baker: Okay, so again, moving nicely on from
that. What sort of changes do you expect to see over the next two years and
then contrasting that over the next 10 years. In other words, short-term and
long-term. How do they...?

Jora
Gill: Within the digital space.

Mark
Baker: Yes, yes. Within the domain of a CDO.

Jora
Gill: Within the domain of a CDO.

Mark
Baker: Which is quite a broad domain, so...

Jora
Gill: Yeah. I think within the next two years,
we'll have established the CDO as a role with a defined purpose.

Mark
Baker: Is that going to be a permanent thing?
Are they going to be permanent CDOs and are there going to be CDOs in ten
years' time?

Jora
Gill: I think there will and the reason I think
there will be because I don't think digital's going to disappear in the next
two to ten years' time so irrespective
of the exact job title, there will be somebody who's responsible for digital
and enhancing a digital strategy. Now, I don't think one person or one
department will be creating all the digital ideas. I think these will be
multifaceted but one person will be responsible for bringing together a digital
strategy and also executing on that strategy. I don't think it'll be a five
year strategy, I think it'll be a six month to three year strategy and as I
said early, you'll be pivoting or preserving more often but I think within the
next two years, people instead of talking about digital and not really knowing
what digital is, will have defined what they mean by a digital strategy.

A lot of organisations currently want a CDO
but they haven't all answered the basic question of why and what is success
when we have the CDO ? I think at the moment, it is a trend to say "We
need to be digital and we need a Chief Digital Officer for us to be
digital." but they haven't quite defined what being digital is and what the
success criteria are. Each organization is different so there is not a single
digital blueprint.

I think over the next ten years, disruption
will be a constant and if organisations have not figured out what makes them
digitally valuable to their customers, then ultimately they're going to fail.
If they are slow or unable to react to digital disruptors then they are
ultimately going to fail. If they are not a digital disruptor themselves then
ultimately they are going to fail.

Mark
Baker: I think that's a very good vision for the
ten years actually and you've actually covered the next question quite well
which is what happens to those who don't transform efficiently. Do you think
any of them will stay here on or...when I say efficiently, some of them, it may
just be that their vision of digital isn't as...or far reaching. We've got
digital. We have a website. We have e-mail.

Jora
Gill: I think it depends on your industry.
Within the media industry, we've been massively disrupted by digital and
reacted to it. I think if you're a logistics company, you can take advantage of
digital but if you're a really good logistics company, you're still going to be
a really good logistics company that uses digital where it brings advantage in
ten years'

Digital is more than producing an app it is
thinking differently and looking at your company differently like a disruptor
would. If you can do this then you should be OK . . . . .

Read more of this interview and others like it from digital thought leader look out for the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook

Wednesday, 10 December 2014

The second part of my interview with Jora Gill from the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer's Handbook. Jora is the new Chief Digital Officer of the Economist.

Continued:

Mark
Baker: Can you tell me what barriers do you see the
CDOs come up against? Your own experience and from those around you. What are
main barriers that stop you from...

Jora
Gill: I think there's a soft side and the hard side
to that question. The hard side is that the CDO skills predominantly come
through from two backgrounds. One is technology so ex-CIOs, ex-CTOs or two is
marketing, so ex-CMOs and what you want with the CDO is a mixture of both. So
you want somebody who really thinks from a customer perspective. How do
customers think and how can we market to those customers but you also want
somebody who can deliver through those great thoughts, you know, a technologist
who's grown up and been able to actually
deliver on the strategic promises. The difficulty is how do find people who have
that joint mindset. If this combined
strategic and operational mindset does not exist there is a danger that the
CDOs fall back into their comfort zone when faced with tough issues. In the case
of the technologist the comfort zone maybe operational and problem solving or
in the case of a business background CDO their comfort zone maybe marketing,
sales or some other discipline. So what's the role of a CDO? If all I do is deliver
technology solutions, then I'm a CIO or CTO. If all I do marketing related,
then I'm a CMO. My role as a CDO has both technology and business drivers. It
consists of three verticals. One is product management new ideas, innovation,
what can we experiment on build fast and fail fast and learn from that. The
second is digital technical with the normal focus on technical demand
management, expectation management, project management and technical
capabilities required to execute. The essential difference here between a CDO
and CIO is that a CDOs role is focused on the touch points of the customer and
not the wider enterprise technologies a CIO has to deal with. The final
vertical is data and analytics. An example of how data is used is that we may
have thought that we had a good idea, we built on that good idea, now let's see
what the customer thought by looking at the data. This essentially provides commercial feedback into the
department and occasionally the feedback says “We can build you great products
but we can also tell you those great products weren't as great as we first
thought.”

The other element of the CDO is the soft
side.. The CDO needs to bring together the whole organisation in embracing a
digital strategy. They do not necessarily have to own or devise the digital
strategy but must champion it. This can take a lot of energy even though it
sounds obvious we should not dismiss this we only need to look at firms like
Kodak and Blockbuster where the digital challenges were staring them in the
face but they could not react due to internal organizational inertia or a
missing digital champion.

Mark
Baker: Do you think there's an element that CIOs
and to a certain extent, CTOs don't have the permission to fail whereas the entrepreneur or the CDO may have?

Jora
Gill: I think so but I think also it depends how
the CIO, CTO's being brought up. So if you've come up from a security
background, your mindset is always going to be on protection. You got to
protect the organisation from people who are trying to bring down your website
or infringe your data and privacy laws. So you come up with a mindset that's sort
of very much into a rulebook rightfully so of reasons why we can't do things
and I think there is a large quantities of CIOs, CTOs that have come up with
always thinking of what can go wrong. So they sit in meetings and they sit in
and that's why they're great CIOs and CTOs because they'll sit in them going “Okay,
you think this project can be delivered in three months but let me tell you we
can't. We haven't the right we have the right people, capable of executing to
the level that we want. So they come from a mindset of what can go wrong. With
the CDO role, you come from a mindset of the art of the possible, going “What
would happen if we did this, this and this?” So you come from that
entrepreneurial mindset. So I think that's the challenge but having said that,
I meet, as I said earlier, I think there's many, many CIOs and CTOs are more
than capable of being bold and of experimenting of failing fast but they have
to get away from thinking that a failed project is a failed project. Sometimes
a failed project is a successful project because what you've done has killed
that project. That three million project; stop it one hundred thousand in, and
someone might say “Oh, you've just wasted a hundred thousand.” and I'd say “No,
I've just saved you two point nine million.” So it's changing your mindset.

. . . to be continued tomorrow . . .Like this? Press G+ below to vote for more like this.

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

This is an excerpt from my interview with Jora Gill from the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer's Handbook. Jora is the new Chief Digital Officer of the Economist. The interview will appear in full with other digital though leaders in the forthcoming handbook.

Mark
Baker:Okay, so the first question is basically a background one. Tell me
about your organisation, yourself and how you got to where you are.

Jora
Gill: Okay. So we're The Economist, a publisher of a weekly print digital
edition as well as an app and at online, economist.com. We talk on a variety of
subjects and we really are there to bring...I would say the news behind the
news to really have folks who read up content and to think about what's
happening around the globe right now. Be it finance, be it business, be it
news, be it technology we want to evoke
a reaction with the news behind the news we'd really like to do is build a community,
we have built a community on the one side terrific journalist, write
world-class stories, on the other our
community of readers of our content and providing
feedback . On my side, I'm the Chief Digital Officer for The Economist. I've
been here three months so it's a fairly new role for me and prior to this, my
background was more technology-based. I was the CTO in a company called
Elsevier[1] which is the largest
publisher of medical and scientific journals, books, online in the world and I
was there for a number of years and before that I was a CTO at Standard and
Poor's[2] which is a financial services institution. What led me to this role
was...it was a crossroad in my career that I could see that digital was
disrupting what we do on a daily basis. Be it through our personal lives or be
it through business and I wanted to move both my technology skills and my
strategic business skills into a role that really blended these along with my passion
of how technology could serve its customers digitally and really, the Chief
Digital Officer allows me to both think from a technology delivery focus on
delivering great technology or delivery great content with technology but also
from a business focus of looking at the customer. What we really want from the second we serve them is
how can we use data and data analytics to serve them better.
For me, it's just a great role to have.

Mark Baker: Although you are quite early
in your development of your road map for The Economist, can you tell me about
your plans and experiences in creating digital road maps for your organisations?

Jora Gill: I'm actually developing a road map right now so I can actually talk
about what we're doing right now. So what I'm seeing is at the heart of
digital, if you put the technology aspect away, at the heart, it's really
getting closer to your customer and the customer is the centre of your
ecosystem. So with your customer in mind, how do you build a digital strategy?
What is it your customer's looking for? What experience are they looking for?
From our aspect, they're looking to read great content but they're looking to
read great content on any device that they're on or any situation that they
are. Be it travelling or they're stuck at home, they want to immerse in our
content or they want to a quick snap of our content. So therefore, you ask 'How
does our customer consume content?" and it's a multiple mobile devices.
What is our strategy for mobile devices? On the other hand, how is our customer
consuming other content on other products and do they want to integrate our
experience they have with us with other products through their mobile devices,
through their desktops and they probably do. So therefore, you need to be able
to be part of their daily lives. The other aspect of it is 'What's happening in
the disruptive world that we find ourselves in?' In digital building a five
year plan or a strategy is going to be very difficult when you're constantly
disrupted through new product sets. So therefore you say “Okay, we are going to
be disrupted and let's accept disruption as the new norm. Let's build our
products or platforms to accept that change is inevitable.” So instead of
building just a product that we hope will be used for five years, let's build
platforms that accept disruption as a constant but also allows us to leverage
that disruption. So when we see some really good CRM product, can we easily
swap our CRM with their CRM when we see really good responsive web front-end
design ask how can we take advantage of responsive easily when we see the
changing expectations of customers on what they want from content. So they
might want bite-size content, they might want a large periodical of content and
the bite-size might serve them well because they find themselves in a situation
where they're travelling and they want to immerse themselves in a topic such as
a visit to China. What do The Economist have to say about China and when I
arrive and land in China, I want to show the people that I'm talking to and
experience with, I've done some background so I just want that content right
now. So how can we take our content to give them what they're looking for right
now or if they're immersing themselves because they a deep reading experience
on a weekend. How do we give them right content at the right moment? So
customers are at the heart of what we do. This results in mapping our customer
journey going “Okay, through the daily life, through the daily week, through
the daily month of a customer, what do they do when they wake up from their
morning, what do they do?” They want a quick snapshot of content.in the morning
At lunchtime, they've got an hour, they've got a sandwich, they want to read a
bit more deeper. So why don't we take ourselves through the customer journey
and see how they want to immerse themselves with content? This is where
customer profiling plays a big part. We need to understand our customers
through their actions and this is where data analytics plays a big part.

So build platforms and customer journeys
then bring together is data. So data should really help us make our
experimentation decisions on new products, on what the customer deems valuable
through profiling the customer and understanding their habits. So a
company...we may think we've just created the best product in the world. If the
customer's not using it, our data will tell us the customer's not interested in
this great product that we've just built, therefore what insights can we take
from the customer experience of the product? Let's learn and put the lessons
into the next iteration of the product. So let's become more agile in the way
we actually deliver value for what we deem as a customer. Why it's difficult to
build a digital road map is because there's a constant change happening and a
constant expectation from our customers so we need to keep ripping out the
rulebook every 6 months, every year and going “Okay, that was important six
months ago, to the customer but right now, it's no longer valuable... they've
topped up on of what they deemed as the most valuable” and our data proves it.
Our data tells us that they're not coming back to us as often as they were on
that...So let's use that data and to say “Do another experiment. We believe the
customer's most important aspect of how they consume our digital content is X
and let's put X out there, let's do some more testing on X and if we find
actually, that is something of interest to our customer, let's persevere with
it. If it's not, let's prove it (the data will tell us) and let's decide...it
didn't work, fail and learn and move on.”

Mark
Baker: Can you talk about more about the
platform product dichotomy because that’s obviously a key part of being able to
allow you to do long-term planning.

Jora
Gill: Sure. So on the platform side, is...at the
heart of what we do is content and that content should be easily found by our
front-end tools. So we need to build a content repository if you like, that's
tagged cleverly. So when a customer's searching for something, it takes that
tagging and builds algorithms around that tagging allows the customer to
find easily, using taxonomies and ontologies, the content they're really
looking for. On the other hand, a customer may say “Look, I just want to read
the content.” So we need to assemble content very easily. So essentially, we
need to build modular content repositories that allow us to take advantage of
the immense content that we've had for many, many years. The Economist was
established in 1843. We weren't quite tagging our content back in 1843 but we
still have some fantastic content. So instead of thinking of The Economist as
just a newspaper that you consume cover to cover or beginning of the app to the
end , it's also pieces of content infographics, videos, audio the written word.
If you start tagging this content, you start building products that are
valuable to your customer and you're going “Okay, we never saw that.” We were
going down the linear route of saying “A customer's going to read our great
content, end-to-end” but now by tagging and building new content, we've
actually seen opportunities for increased customers value so it's building up
modular pieces on platform.

On the other hand, a customer looks above
the line on what they see in be it the apps or the web site. They're also
looking below the line that they want a great experience. So customer service
should be great in the digital world, CRM should be great, marketing should be
great and we're not marketing them products that they're not interested in and
so we have this 360 view of below the line of what the customers wants and experiences
above the line. So we want to take advantage of great CRM systems, great
marketing systems but we don't necessarily want to build those. We want to be
able to integrate those great systems into our architecture very easily and
then when those systems aren't cutting-edge or aren't what we believe is the
best agreed road map, we want to be able to remove them instantly and integrate
new forms.

So the platforms I'm talking about are
providing us competitive advantage by firstly building great content and
delivering this great content to the customers to experience but secondly we
also want to take the competitive advantage of best of breed systems in the CRM
space, the marketing space, in the eCommerce space by being able to plug in
those great tools into our digital ecosystem systems until we feel that they've
lost their competitive energy and somebody else is doing much better and we
swap in and out new systems into our digital platform. So it is lean enablement
of our architecture where architecture stops being a journey where you have to
land i.e. an architecture can no longer
be a as-is to a to-be exercise because with constant disruption we do not know
what the to-be is. Therefore what we really want is an enabling and evolving
architecture. We want an architecture that allows us to evolve and doesn't
hamper us from creatingthat
great experience or taking advantage of others who are creating great products
that we can integrate with.

. . . continued tomorrow . . .

The full text of all the interviews will appear in the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook

[1] Elsevier B.V. (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛlzəvir]) is an academic publishing company which publishes medical and
scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Leading
products include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, books such as Gray's
Anatomy, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and
Current Opinion series of journals, and the online citation database Scopus.
Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,200 journals. Its archives
contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240
million. Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of US$3.2
billion.

[2] Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC (S&P) is an
American financial services company. It is a division of McGraw Hill Financial
that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. S&P is
responsible for stock market indices the U.S.-based S&P 500, the Canadian
S&P/TSX, and the Australian S&P/ASX 200. S&P is considered one of
the Big Three credit-rating agencies.

Tuesday, 2 December 2014

The National Retail Federation (NRF) reported that US retailers showed a reduction in "Black Friday" spending, with sales falling 11% from the same period last year ($50.9bn down from $57bn). In the same report US consumers spent on average $380.95 per person, down 6.4% from a year ago.
On Monday reduced sales actually impacted Apple shares with a drop of 6.4% to $111.27 in the first 30 minutes of trading Monday.

So what's actually happened? Well, the figures are not all in, especially for the whole season, but what we might be seeing is a shift from a domination by physical retail outlets to online as part of the digital transformation of holiday season retail. As digital matures this is accompanied by a shift from surge shopping to an expectation that products will be available and delivered on demand and that online shoppers can wait later in the season . The idea that prospective shoppers might camp out over the Thanksgiving holiday in an effort to secure a place in front of the line and thus a better chance at getting desired items is falling back into history in much the same way that similar lines for luxuries behind the iron curtain has.